Would you trust an algorithm? Phone Rocket thinks it knows which smartphones are best

Phone Rocket algorithm claims to know smartphones best

A pair of Waterloo University engineering graduates believe they can tackle an age-old question, argued on message boards, in bars and at extended family gatherings world round: “What phone should I get?”

Or at least, that’s the goal anyway, and the reason why their new service, Phone Rocket, was made.

It’s the latest project from Christopher Reid and Alex Black, co-founders of the camera comparison site SnapSort – and, since July 2012, part of the Rebellion Media family of websites. The pair have made a living developing a swath of product comparison sites that, thanks to an impressive ranking algorithm, is relatively easy to adapt to new verticals.

Phone Rocket, for example, was built in less than two months.

“Our goal is to aggregate reviews, data, benchmarks – anything that we can find that we think would inform a better purchasing decision,” said Mr. Reid from his office in Waterloo.

Like a Metacritic of sorts for smartphones, Phone Rocket aggregates hardware and software performance benchmarks, but can also pick out tone and sentiment contained within both professional and user-written reviews. The site’s engine uses a combination of natural language processing, machine learning and other algorithmic capabilities to distill all of this information into data points that can be more easily ranked and compared.

“Our goal is to look at that data and sort of statistically say that we think this is the right answer, based on our confidence in the source,” Mr. Reid explained.

“It’s aggregated, so it’s not going to be perfect. But [compared to human curation] we’ll make less mistakes.”

In recent years websites such as The Wirecutter and gdgt have defined themselves by not aggregating benchmarks and numbers, relying instead on more organic, hand-curated rankings and human reviews alone.

But hand-curation doesn’t scale very well, and for what Mr. Reid and Mr. Black want to do – take on the likes of Google in terms of organizing massive, structured data sets – algorithms are what make sense.

The pair have been working on what they call their core technology since 2009, when they founded SnapSort, a comparison site for digital cameras. Their network of sites has since grown to include: TwinRev, aimed at the automotive crowd; TripWhat, which aggregates travel activities in foreign cities; and GPUBoss and CPUBoss, two comparison sites for computer hardware.

Combined, Mr. Reid says they attract about 5.5- to 6 million visitors each month. And he’s confident enough in the technology his team is building that he believes others might be interested in it too.

“There are a bunch of big players who really need structured data to compete with Google,” which, according to Mr. Reid, is the only company really building legitimate sets of structured data. It’s what powers the likes of Google Now and Google’s Knowledge Graph (otherwise known as the “cards” of information that appear for popular search results or natural language queries).

“There’s a long term play where we’re looking to partner with people who need this sort of solution.”

He mentions the likes of Apple, Yahoo, and Samsung. Or, yet another option is to leverage all of the sentiment and opinion data that Phone Rocket gathers, and sell access to that data for the purposes of brand analytics.

“Our whole goal is to build this massive structured data set for all these different categories,” says Mr. Reid. And for now, that means putting Androids and iPhones head-to-head. But technology is just the start.

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